Last day of school ...

What do you get at the drawing table on the last day of the preschool year?

"I'm drawing a green bee ... with purple hair!" - Georgia

Our insect unit was about a month ago, I wonder where this came from in the depths of her three-year-old memory. Interesting: after this picture, she left to play with other children, then returned later. Why draw just one bee, when you can draw ...

"Look at all your bees!" I said.
"Yes," she said. "Papa Bee [left], Mama Bee [right], and Baby Bee [above]."
She can imagine a green bee with purple hair, yet the very real structures of her life come through as well ... always a balance of the abstract and the concrete ...

The bee theme continues: Tommy is splotching all over his paper with a black marker. "What are you doing?" asks Kevin. "I'm making bee footprints," responds Tommy, without breaking a mote of concentration.

Kevin goes with it: "Are you gonna draw the honey, Tommy?" Tommy grabs a yellow marker and begins drawing with it. "Yeah," he says, "right there." "And the flower?" Kevin continues, "And the honey in it?" Tommy continues drawing without once looking at Kevin.

It is amazing to me the zone children seem to get into when they are engaging in art. It is such an informal, yet very involved and intentional act. As we see above, it seems to be a platform where children are expressing, sorting out, making sense of what they have learned. But they are not in their own little worlds, as we might imagine the more eccentric artists of the world. Though they mostly stick to their own canvases, there is an interplay of questions and ideas, out of which a certain theme - in this case, bees - emerges. As the teacher, who is trying harder to listen than to talk, it is my chance to observe how each student is processing this theme. Georgia seems to be taking bees over into her known world, while Kevin is making the rounds on his current scaffolding of bee knowledge, though it is clear there is still room for it to develop (honey is not found in the flowers, the bees extract nectar and make honey from it in their hives). And who knows what Tommy is thinking, whether he set out to make bee footprints, or if his vicinity to and awareness of Georgia's bee family helped him give meaning to what he was doing.

It is good to know that, even on the last day of school, the children are still learning. They will continue to do so, every day, every picture, every thought ... that is indeed, good to know.